UnitedHealth Mandates 4-Day Office Return
UnitedHealth Group has updated its return-to-office policy, requiring hybrid employees in Minnesota and Washington, D.C. to work from the office four days per week starting July 7. The Minneapolis/St Business Journal reported the change.
“Fostering strong connections and in-person collaboration helps strengthen employee teams based in our Twin Cities offices to further enhance innovation and better coordinate the support we provide to the customers we are honored to serve,” the company said.
Here’s what we know about UnitedHealth’s RTO policy.
UnitedHealth Group’s Return To Office Policy
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Shift From Previous RTO Policy
The update marks the first formal change to UnitedHealth’s RTO expectations in four years. The company initially announced a three-day-per-week hybrid model in July 2021. That policy accompanied a broader shift to remote work and a corresponding reduction in office space.
In 2023, UnitedHealth announced it would relocate its Minnetonka, MN headquarters to a consolidated Optum campus in Eden Prairie, citing the need for less office space as remote and hybrid work became more common.
Scope and Implementation
It remains unclear how many of the company’s roughly 400,000 employees are affected. The current directive applies only to certain hybrid employees based in Minnesota and Washington, D.C.
Access Every Fortune 500 RTO Policy
At the time of writing, UnitedHealth Group is one of 18 Fortune 500 companies that require four days per week in the office.
- Four-day companies make up 10% of the known policies for the Fortune 500
- Four days per week is the fourth most common policy in the Fortune 500
Let’s call this out for what it is. The “fostering connections and collaboration” line is just corporate spin. The reality is that most of us were hired as full-time telecommuters, and our teams are scattered across the country. Going into an office only to sit by ourselves isn’t collaboration—it’s a tactic to make working conditions worse so people quit voluntarily and the company avoids severance obligations.
On top of that, targeting only employees within a certain radius of an office is inherently discriminatory. Discrimination isn’t limited to race—it’s any policy that unfairly treats one group of employees differently than others. Here, two groups of people hired under the same terms (remote/telecommute) are suddenly given unequal treatment based solely on where they live, not their performance. That’s arbitrary, it has a disparate impact, and it creates unequal conditions of employment.